Grandison explains, “I didn’t want to sign her death certificate. In my opinion a proper investigation was not conducted. There was a lot of talk she was murdered. The Kennedy name was mentioned.” But Dr. Curphy summoned him into his private office with other officials from the D.A.’s Office, LAPD, and team members from the suicide prevention center conducting the psychiatric autopsy. A studio executive and a representative from Prudential Insurance Company were in attendance. Making it “official,” Grandison signed his name. With two years of experience and a keen sense of observation, Grandison carried out his duties efficiently. He claims the first autopsy report “disappeared,” which then was substituted by a second; and finally a third surfaced. The stenographer of record reported to Lionel regarding the three versions.
Dr. Theodore Curphy held a worldwide press conference on August 18, 1962. When fielding questions, he succinctly gave a certain time of death. He said, “Rigor mortis was far advanced and she was dead a minimum of three hours, probably more.” When asked the pointed question: “Did she take the lethal dose in one gulp or was there an interval of time involved?” Without hesitation, Dr. Curphy answered, “We estimate that she took [forty-two capsules] with one gulp within, let’s say a period of seconds.”
“Probable suicide” became the official conclusion of the coroner’s report. Dr. Noguchi agrees the autopsy was incomplete. John Miner not only witnessed the autopsy, but exclusively listened to Marilyn’s final taped sessions with Dr. Greenson. In 1962, he sent a memo to his supervisor, the chief deputy D.A., with a copy to the medical examiner. Miner reported that in his professional opinion, Marilyn Monroe had not committed suicide.
Twenty years later, during a new district attorney’s “probe,” Miner again in his report said it was not suicide. Dr. Noguchi now believes “an accidental overdose of that magnitude was extremely unlikely ” Since Monroe’s death, he had performed numerous forensic investigations involving suicide with the drug Nembutal. “I believe that the sheer number of pills Monroe ingested was too many to swallow accidentally.” He once said that in every death there are lessons to be learned for the living. On Marilyn’s demise, he reached the conclusion: “If Miner’s evaluation in 1962 was correct, the only conceivable cause of Monroe’s death was homicide.” Today John Miner is a noted medical malpractice attorney. He still contends Marilyn did not take her own life.
24
Her Hero’s Good-Bye
The search for next of kin who might claim the body of Marilyn Monroe fell to the Coroner’s Office. Assigned to the task, Lionel Grandison did his best to track down a family member or friend to arrange for her burial, thereby avoiding a most uncomfortable situation for the Coroner’s Office, which by law would have to cremate her unclaimed body. Since no one had volunteered, the office retrieved a phone book from her home.
Marilyn’s mother Gladys was found, but Grandison was told she was incompetent. This was from the director of the sanitarium where she was institutionalized. Her guardian and Marilyn’s business manager, Inez Melson, suggested that her half-sister Bernice could complete burial arrangements. But Bernice had neither the financial wherewithal nor the stomach to handle the arrangements. They deferred to Joe DiMaggio.
Once Joe had made up his mind to take control of the burial, he handled it with dignity so as to avoid what would undoubtedly have become a publicity circus for Hollywood. He ensured that Marilyn’s final resting place and tribute would be devoid of the fanfare that plagued the actress and their marriage.
A small funeral parlor, Westwood Mortuary, was selected. Marilyn’s surrogate mother, Ana Lower, had been buried from there, and Monroe had spent some afternoons reading at her graveside. DiMaggio purchased a solid bronze casket and a vase, which for the next twenty years would continually be filled with roses. For Marilyn’s final preparation he called upon Whitey Snyder.
Whitey brought Marjorie along for support and assistance in the grim task. Whitey had never made up a corpse, let alone the corpse of a close friend. Hand in hand, Marjorie and Whitey solemnly walked down the long hallway toward the room where they would find Marilyn’s body. Still on a steel gurney, the body was covered by a white sheet, toe protruding and tagged. Whitey placed his makeup box quietly on the floor next to the gurney and uncovered the body. He took a deep breath and gasped at the sight of the dead woman, blurting to his silenced friend, “Goddam it, honey, if I don’t put my hand on your head, I’m going to run down the frickin’ street.”
The tedious and ghastly task at hand proceeded. Whitey pretended that the actress was merely lying asleep. Somehow it made the gruesomeness of what he was actually doing a little less so.
Only two days before he had said to himself, “It must be Marilyn calling to talk,” when the phone rang insistently at 5:40 A.M. Half-dazed and somewhat reluctant to answer, Whitey turned on the night light to ready himself for a lengthy heart-to-heart chat with Marilyn, who regularly telephoned in the middle of the night “just to talk.”
But Whitey was mistaken. This time it had been his outdoorsman son, Ron, who had been out and about in the early morning and had just heard a radio newscast announcing the suicide of Marilyn Monroe. He called his father immediately.
Whitey immediately dialed Marilyn’s phone number, only to get a busy signal. In an instant, he was out of bed and dressed to go see for himself. Could it be possible?
The front seat of his Plymouth coupe was damp and cold. He turned on the radio as he backed out of the driveway waiting to catch the latest news broadcast.
“It just can’t be,” he kept repeating to himself over and over again as he absently drove through stoplights on Sunset Boulevard on his way to Marilyn’s home.
He prayed the news report had been a mistake. The media had erred many times about Marilyn. And there were always her overzealous publicity people. “Of course, they made a mistake. They always do, don’t they?” he kept repeating.
The ten-minute drive seemed endless as Whitey mulled over the precious times he had shared with Marilyn. He had met her in 1947, at Fox. Whitey had been a makeup artist doing screen tests. A mousy blonde with opinions of her own was up next. Whitey remembered, “She started instructing me how to shade her nose, how her eyes should be done, and how she should look.” When asked if she had ever been in film before, she replied honestly that she hadn’t, but knew how to do her makeup anyway!
Not an argumentative man by nature, Whitey allowed the spunky Norma Jeane the privilege of applying her own makeup. One of Fox’s top Technicolor cameramen, Leon Shamroy, was shooting screen tests that day. After spotting Marilyn through his lens, he vented, “Where the hell did you get that makeup?”
Aware that her makeup artist was taking the blame, Norma Jeane stepped up to the table and admitted it was her own creation and not his fault. Shamroy was impressed by her frankness and honesty but still ordered her back to the makeup department to wash her face. “Put it on right,” he had yelled at Whitey.
Never before had Whitey met anyone like her. It wasn’t her beauty or her body; it was her sincerity and honesty that attracted him and bonded them from that moment on.
He remembered the time at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles when Monroe appeared with comedian Jack Benny. Her stage fright was as intense as always. She sat motionless, almost catatonic in her dressing room. “I had to literally kick her in the ass to move her onto the stage. She was petrified. She couldn’t even take the first few steps.” After the kick, Marilyn was perfect, and subsequently she had always asked Whitey how her performances had gone and he always reassured her that they were wonderful. Marilyn Monroe had never really believed she was sensational.
Whitey recalled the laughs they had shared together... those special mornings at Twentieth Century-Fox when Marilyn couldn’t find a ride to work and hitchhiked to the studio. The actress wore skin-tight dungarees, an ordinary shirt tied at the waist, a scarf wrapped around her stringy hair, and gobs and gobs of Vaseline petroleum jelly smeared on her
face. This was Marilyn Monroe’s trademark—a greasy face. She had a difficult time getting picked up. She sometimes stood on Doheny Drive for almost thirty minutes before a driver stopped to take her down the hill. Then at the studio came the task of removing the grease from her face. Whitey grimaced as he took a clean terry towel to scrub her face. He had a difficult time removing all the petroleum jelly from her pores, but afterward her skin would be supple and glowing. Marilyn insisted it was the reason for her complexion. The National Board of Dermatology finally recognized in March 1992 that petroleum jelly is as beneficial to skin as any expensive cream on the market.
He remembered some of the best times when Marilyn had been a stock player at Fox and was still living in the Studio Club. While on location doing publicity stills, Whitey had invited her to join him for a day at his sprawling Pacific Palisades home. After playing in the sun for hours, perhaps it would be an afternoon for dipping in his swimming pool or competitive badminton, then the current rage. They always had a lot of laughs. At that time Whitey kept his thirty-five-foot schooner in San Pedro. Marilyn was always welcome for a sail in the Los Angeles harbor, and whenever she could, she grabbed the chance to let the nippy ocean air soothe her. Sometimes Whitey and his children invited her along for fun at Pacific Ocean Amusement Park. They enjoyed shooting at the moving ducks or the clowns, eating ice cream cones and cotton candy or screaming in the dark of the funhouse. Dressed in a pair of casual dungarees with a bandanna hiding her bleached blond hair, Marilyn concealed her identity from strangers. After wearing themselves ragged, Whitey would return with the exhausted “children” for some home-style cooking. Occasionally Marilyn would stay the night, pillow-talking with his youngsters. These were times when Marilyn had felt like a member of his family.
There were also times Whitey had been angry with her. Marilyn was truly gullible. Everybody tried to sell her a bill of goods and she was forever buying. Those who knew she was deeply unsure of herself often preyed upon her lack of confidence. Whitey often cautioned her about people with ulterior motives.
He had begged her to quit the film business in order to protect her mental health. He had warned her about Miller, and she hadn’t listened. He had warned her about the Kennedys, and she didn’t listen. If only she and DiMaggio could have worked out their differences. How he wished Marilyn hadn’t had to depend on adulation from strangers and sycophants!
Whitey reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and felt instead a gold money clip that Marilyn had given him. The clip recalled a time in 1953 during the filming of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes when Marilyn had succumbed to another insecurity bout and ended up hospitalized at Cedars of Labanon Hospital with a severe chest cold.
Reporters were awaiting her departure. As usual, she had called upon Whitey to get his makeup case and come down to “fix her up.” While he applied her makeup in bed, and feeling depressed, Marilyn spoke about death. She wanted reassurance from Snyder that he would never desert her, as so many had, and that he would never let a strange person touch her and her face when she died. She asked, “Will you make me up after I die?”
In jest, Whitey responded, “Honey, bring the body back while you’re still warm and I’d be interested.” Whitey forgot their conversation until after the wrap of the film that same year. But Marilyn hadn’t forgotten; in gratitude she presented Snyder with a gold money clip inscribed “While I’m Still Warm.”
“Whitey, Whitey,” Marjorie prompted, bringing him back to the task at hand, “Is this too much for you, honey?” The visibly shaken makeup man had to face the grim chore of bringing life to the lifeless corpse in front of him. The cold, hard fact was that his beloved Marilyn was not still warm.
Her white pasty skin needed much more than her usual foundation, but he did his best. Realizing her hair had been covered with formaldehyde, Whitey and Marjorie decided it was impossible to style, and they called Sydney Guillaroff, the fifty-two-year-old Canadian who was “hairdresser to the stars.”
Sydney sent for some wigs from Fox’s makeup department, and by the time they arrived, Marjorie had already prepared Marilyn’s bustline. The deep incision into her chest cavity during the autopsy had deflated her bosom. Marjorie padded the chest and reconstructed the body of Marilyn Monroe, “the national treasure.” When Sydney arrived with the wigs he fainted to the floor upon sight of the actress’s corpse. Whitey and Marjorie had to revive him. Whitey eventually loosened up and became more comfortable talking about the body and reminiscing about Marilyn.
While not quite finished with the job, Whitey and Marjorie had been interrupted by aggressive photographers in the hallway knocking at the door. One man begged for a photo and offered Whitey $10,000 to take it. Whitey refused. Another, from Life magazine, tempted his ethics, but again Whitey held firm.
Marjorie disliked the dress Inez Melson had chosen for Marilyn’s last appearance. Though the actress had admired Marilyn’s last appearance. Though the actress had admired the European designer Pucci and wore many of his designs, the lime green dress did not seem to enhance her silenced beauty in death. But under time pressure and against their better “wardrobe” judgment, Marjorie and Whitey dressed Monroe’s body and put a green chiffon scarf around her neck for an open casket.
It was customary at services for the deceased to clutch flowers, usually roses. Allan Abbott, the funeral owner, was quickly dispatched to the local florist to bring back red roses. The red roses looked too flashy with Marilyn’s green apparel and Marjorie asked for a replacement of nine yellow rosebuds.
Finally finished with the redressing, hair, and makeup, Snyder and Plecher announced to a patiently waiting DiMaggio that they were finished. They said their last goodbyes and left a somber Joe DiMaggio alone. He sat beside her. When Whitey returned the next morning Joe was still sitting in the same place. His eyes were red and swollen. Both Whitey and Marjorie knew all too well how much the two had loved each other, in spite of their differences. If only they had compromised, Snyder wished, Marilyn might still be alive!
Recovering from a near sleepless night themselves and observing Joe’s intense grief did not help the two hungover mourners. Immediately after leaving the mortuary the night before, Whitey had purchased a half gallon of gin and gone back to Marjorie’s apartment, where the couple drank the entire bottle and passed out. Dulling their emotions with alcohol almost allowed them to block out the pain of Marilyn’s death.
The selection of pallbearers was decided by Joe. Frank Sinatra begged to be included but was ignored by DiMaggio. Whitey Snyder and Sidney Guillaroff, and DiMaggio’s son, Joe, Jr., were chosen. The remainder would be selected by the funeral home.
Limiting the guests was easy for DiMaggio. Only those especially close to Monroe would be allowed. His dictum that no Kennedy would be allowed included Peter Lawford and his wife, Pat, who chartered a jet to attend, but Joe adhered to his decision and kept her out. He blamed Monroe’s death on the Kennedys.
Eunice Murray, who eventually changed her public account of the sequence of events of the evening of Monroe’s death, was invited with Dr. Greenson and his family and sat next to brother-in-law Mickey Rudin. Dr. Engelberg did not attend the ceremonies. Years later his ex-would contend that he had monies stashed in Swiss accounts received after Monroe’s death.
Pat Newcomb’s display of emotion had reached Joe DiMaggio, and he was touched. Newcomb had refused to accept Marilyn’s death. When asked to leave Monroe’s home the morning after, she was still in denial, hysterically crying. Within a couple of days Newcomb would accept an invitation to the Kennedy home in Hyannisport, ostensibly to “regroup,” and then she conveniently disappeared to Europe, where she claims she worked for the Venice Film Festival. Her passport would later reveal that she traveled to Germany, France, Holland, Denmark, and Italy.
When she returned, Pat went on the government payroll as an information specialist in motion pictures for the U.S. Information Agency. Reporter Walter Winchell broke the Newcomb story. She was working
in an office adjacent to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Once it was discovered her civil service form was incomplete, Pat was dismissed. Then she joined Bobby Kennedy’s staff after he resigned his office of attorney general to run for the Senate from New York. When Pierre Salinger, a former Kennedy press secretary, ran for the California state senate, Newcomb joined his staff.
Newcomb now defensively attempts to diffuse the evidence to the contrary, claiming, “The Kennedys never gave me a dime, never offered me anything, and never made a job available to me.”
Reporters were barred from inside the Westwood Mortuary services. Even the journalists who had been close to Monroe had been ignored. Joe’s old ally, Walter Winchell, who had attempted to bribe Whitey into taking a photo of Marilyn’s body in the funeral parlor, was excluded. Once close to the DiMaggios, Winchell had lost favor with Joe. Though he withheld the Monroe/Kennedy affairs from the press while she was still alive, he was the first reporter to suggest that the Kennedys were responsible for her death.
Investigative reporter Dorothy Killgallen attempted to crash the ceremonies, but failed to do so. Later, she spearheaded an investigation of Marilyn’s death and later the assassination of JFK. She was found dead from “natural causes,” but foul play was suspected as she died of a drug overdose.
Few of Monroe’s acquaintances in Hollywood were granted entrance, but masseur Ralph, chauffeur Rudy, and Fred Karger and his mother, Mary Karger, joined the few mourners in the chapel. The press photographers and reporters were barred from the entrance.
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